


If, If, If...

by RiseHigh



Series: The Reluctant Housemates [10]
Category: Class (TV 2016)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Just Charlie being emo and complicated while sitting with Quill, Post-Episode 1x07, Reluctant Housemates, Unconventional Families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 12:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8801209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RiseHigh/pseuds/RiseHigh
Summary: If she does wake up, he was afraid of what will happen.But he was even more afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just me trying to get into Charlie's complicated little head while he's alone in the house with Quill. 
> 
> (While also being very Type-A and needing to explain the logistics of getting Quill out of the school and why Charlie took of her coat but nothing else. Are these things that *needed* to be explained? No. But will I attempt to explain them? Yes. This is who I am.)

_If this was a joke it wasn’t funny._

Quill couldn’t have gotten the arn out of her head and she couldn’t be pregnant.  Neither of those things had been true an hour ago.  Yet, the arn was in a bag on the floor—Charlie had let it fall to the ground when he scrambled for her gun—and she was visibly pregnant.  She also was not waking up.  He dropped to his knees.

“Quill?”  No response.  He shook her shoulder as Matteusz crouched down next to him.  “Quill.”

Matteusz’s reached out to feel for a pulse.  “It’s slow,” he said after a moment.

“Slow for a human?”

“Yes.  Is her heart rate different?”

“It’s faster, so if it’s slower…”

“It is steady though,” Matteusz said calmly even though his face also looked concerned.  As if on cue, Quill exhaled slowly.  “See,” he added as she sucked in another breath.  “Blood loss, maybe?”

Charlie followed his gaze to the bag holding the arn.  There was a lot of blood.  Maybe that was all this was.  He grabbed the bag and stood up to find his coat and backpack. 

“She still may need a hospital,” Matteusz said from where he remained crouched at her side.

“No.”  Charlie found his backpack and put the bag with the arn inside it.  “What would we say?” He shrugged on his coat as he continued, “‘She’s an alien terrorist who removed the creature that was put in her head as punishment’?”

“So hospital is out.”

“Unless you want her carted off to a lab somewhere.  Then again, they’d probably take me too, which might be better for everyone,” he said with a strangled laugh.

“Charlie.”  Matteusz stood up and took both his hands.  “I do not want that.  We need to talk and maybe need some space, but I do not want you out of my life.  You know this.”

“Yes, sorry,” Charlie said quickly.  The words came out with a rush of air and he found himself struggling to replace the oxygen.  “And I want the same.  I just…” he trailed off as he looked at Quill.  “This was never supposed to happen.  She was never supposed to get the arn out of her head.  I don’t know why she would even try.  I don’t know what to do.”

“Breathe.”

“Right.”  He took a few deep breaths, keeping his eyes locked with Matteusz’s.  “We have to get her home,” he said once his breathing had returned to normal.  “She can’t stay here.”

“I agree.”

Charlie looked to see the headmistress in the doorway.  He thought back to a couple weeks before and a mention of a deal between her and Quill.  This must have been it.  How could they be so reckless?

“What did you do?” he demanded.

“That is not your concern.”

“Neither is this.”

She looked at him levelly.  “You’re in my school.”

“Not for long.”

Charlie knelt down to scoop Quill into his arms.  He half expected her to wake up and protest, but her head just lolled back.  Matteusz reached forward to adjust her head so it rested against his shoulder. 

“You plan to walk down the street like that?” she asked.  “It will raise questions.”

“She has point,” Matteusz said reluctantly and Charlie had to agree.  They would make quite the spectacle.

“I have a car.  I will drive you home.”

Even with Quill’s gun in his pocket, Charlie still didn’t trust the headmistress enough to get in her car. “I’m not letting you drive us anywhere.”

“I will drive,” Matteusz said firmly.

“You will not.”

“Then we walk,” Matteusz said with a shrug.  He picked up his bag and nodded at Charlie to start walking.

“Oh, very well.”

* * *

_If it was the arn, surely it would have killed her by now._

It had been three days and she still hadn’t moved. 

Well, she had moved when he first arrived.  It had been after Matteusz had left.  He had offered to stay—to help with Quill—but Charlie didn’t want that.  As much as he needed Matteusz, he did not want to stay if it was only out of obligation.  Forced cohabitation wouldn’t be healthy for either of them.  If Matteusz wanted space, then Charlie would allow him that.  So, once they were certain the headmistress kept her word and was not returning, Matteusz had kissed him goodbye and left.

Charlie had climbed the stairs and lingered in the doorway of the bedroom.  She was on her back just as he had left her.

Her jacket was twisted around her in a way that couldn’t be comfortable, so he walked over take it off of her.  Once her arms were free, Quill rolled onto her side and curled into herself.  Charlie had jumped back at the sudden movement and pulled out the gun.  He had called her name hesitantly—then forcefully—but neither elicited a response or further movement.  After a few minutes of stillness, he tentatively reached for the zip on her boots.  Her legs stiffened before jerking further inward. 

Again, he jumped back at the movement and, again, there was no further movement from her.

Charlie wondered if it was some kind of fit, but there weren’t any other spasms and her muscles weren’t contracting.   She was merely tense—defensivee, he realized once her body relaxed approximately ten minutes after he ceased trying to help her out of her clothes.  Whatever was happening with her, she did not like to be touched—and it wasn’t just by him.  That evening, he had tried covering her with a blanket, but she had the same reaction.  When she didn’t relax after twenty minutes, he removed the blanket and just let her be. 

He had slept fitfully that first night.  He missed Matteusz and kept dreaming of Quill looming over him with her gun, even though it was safely out of reach in the Cabinet of Souls.

When he had awoken the next morning to an empty room, Charlie assumed he would find her dead—the poison of the arn finally having taken its toll.  But there she was, in the same position and still breathing slowly but steadily.  Her lips looked dry, so he got water and tilted her head so he could pour some down her throat.  She swallowed a few times before he felt her body begin to tense like it had the night before.  He pulled back and let her curl back onto her side. 

There was nothing else to do, so he left for school and returned to a quiet house and an unmoving—but alive—Quill. 

The pattern repeated itself and by the third day, Charlie was fairly confident that it wasn’t the arn’s poison causing this.  Growing up, Charlie had always known what the arn was and how it was used as punishment against the Quill, but he was never told the details until she was arrested and bound to him.  Even then, he did not know everything.  His tutors had insisted that they start at the beginning with the science behind the genetic engineering of the arn.  The Shadow Kin killed his tutors before he could learn much beyond that, but he knew enough about the poison to know it wasn’t this slow acting. 

Even when the differences in day length between Earth and Rhodia were taken into account, Quill would not still be alive three days later if the poison was the cause.

Of course, that did not mean that the removal had not resulted some kind of permanent brain damage.  The arn was designed to find its way to a specific part of a Quill brain, so that it would not impede motor or brain function or cause any pain (so long as the prisoner complied with his or her punishment).  The arn was big—bigger than he had remembered.  It must have grown since it was inserted.  If it was removed carelessly, it would no doubt cause damage.    And, if that was the case, then she might never wake up. 

But even that didn’t make sense.  Quill had been walking and talking—firing her gun—before she had collapsed. Before her eyes rolled back in her head.

Charlie shook his head and went back to his history reading.  He had taken to doing all of his homework in her room.  Despite trying to focus on the words of his text, his mind kept going back to the image of her eyes rolling back in her head.  His memory wasn’t from the classroom though and, while the eyes were the same, her face had been different.  It had been on Rhodia when they had released the arn into her skull.  Charlie had to be present to establish the telepathic link and had stood against the opposite wall of the room from where she was sat—restrained and under a paralytic agent. 

Even though had been incapacitated, the royal guard had kept space between him and her—you could never trust a Quill.

Still, Charlie had been close enough to see her eyes.  They were the only part of her that moved.  When he was escorted into the room she had glared at him, but when the procedure began, her eyes had started darting around the room as if she was trying to see what they were doing with the laser.  But once the surgeon made the incision at the base of her skull and released the arn, her eyes stopped moving and rolled back into her head.  It felt like he stood there forever, before she finally blinked and her pupils could be seen again.  She had looked straight at him—her gaze somehow both fixed yet unfixed.  A minute later, he was ushered out of the room. 

It was hours before he had seen her again and, when he did, she was back to glaring—back to normal—except that now she couldn’t hurt him or any other Rhodian. She had been angry but alive.

Charlie couldn’t understand why Quill would take this risk. Yes, she complained, but what prisoner didn’t complain about punishment?  The arn was far less cruel than other punishments and he had always tried to be fair and do what was best.  So what if she couldn’t fight or use weapons?  She didn’t need to.  And protecting him?  Well, that was a small price to pay for what she had done.  If Quill would have just accepted it and let go of her anger, then things would have been so much easier.  But no, she had had to fight it at every turn and now she was here: immobile on the bed with a ragged scaron her face.

Sighing, he closed his book and got up to give her more water.  He spread cream he had picked up at the chemist on the scar and then collected his books.  He would have better luck finishing his assignment in his own room.

* * *

_If I didn’t have this thing in my head…_

By the fifth day, Charlie began to wonder why he even kept returning to her bedside.  There was never any change.  He studied her stomach—trying to discern whether it was getting bigger.  Hesitantly, he reached out and placed his palm on it—next to where her own hand laid.  Predictably, she began to tense and he pulled his hand away.  But not before he felt movement—the movement of the baby.

Or babies.  Quills had litters.

Charlie didn’t know much about Quill reproduction, but he knew that much.  He also knew that for some archaic reason they insisted on birth taking place in a nest instead of a medical facility.  They had all kinds of backwards traditions like that—the most contemptible of which was allowing the offspring to consume the mother (whose death was another fact he wanted to ignore but couldn’t).  The whole practice was barbaric.  

Was that what this was?  Would he walk in one morning and find a litter of Quills consuming her?  Charlie shuddered at the thought.

Quill had to wake up before then.  If she woke up before the birth then they could find some way around it.  They could call the Doctor.  The medical lab in the TARDIS had been beyond anything he had ever seen.  The Doctor could ensure that she survived the birth (and with any luck, devise some other way to prevent Quill from killing him). 

The only problem was that, for some unknown reasons, the Doctor had only given the number to Quill.

And, of course, her phone was locked.  Seemingly permanently so, after he tried one too many time to guess the password.  He should have ordered her to give him both the passcode and the Doctor’s phone number when he had the chance—before they were sucked into this repetitive (and lonely) cycle of watching and waiting for a chance that never came.  Only her scar seemed to change—growing less red each day. 

It was comforting to know that something was healing, that she was capable of improving—that she might wake up.

The healing of the scar also terrified him.  It was a glaring reminder that the arn was gone and, with it, his protection.  Quill would kill him.  Not immediately, of course, she would need him to use the Cabinet of Souls, but his death would follow.  Then Gods know what else she would do.  (He had an idea—he had heard dozens of iterations of things she would do but for the thing in her head.)  Without the arn to restrain her, there was nothing to stop her from taking her anger out on his friends or any other human that looked at her the wrong way.

Yet, as dangerous as he knew Quill was, he still longed for her to wake. 

It wasn’t the loneliness. Yes, Charlie missed his friends and Matteusz desperately, but loneliness wasn’t a foreign concept to him.  There had been times on Rhodia when loneliness was his only companion, so he knew how to cope with that.  It didn’t make things any easier, but Charlie could survive with loneliness.

But being alone—truly the last survivor of Rhodia?  The thought of that was unbearable.

Charlie had the Cabinet of Souls (and the glimmer of hope it carried), but the souls didn’t live and breathe.  They didn’t remember.  Quill remembered.  Charlie had no illusions about their relationship.  He and Quill would never sit around reminiscing about the world they had lost.  Besides, the Rhodia she remembered was probably very different than his Rhodia.  But it was still a memory of Rhodia—there was a comfort in that even if they never spoke about it.  If she died, there would be no one else who remembered.

There would only be him. Alone.

* * *

_If she does wake up, he was afraid of what will happen._

_But he was even more afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t._


End file.
